The present invention concerns electrolytic capacitors, particularly those for use in medical devices, such as implantable defibrillators.
Every year more than half a million people in the United States suffer from heart attacks, more precisely cardiac arrests. Many of these cardiac arrests stem from the heart chaotically twitching, or fibrillating, and thus failing to rhythmically expand and contract as necessary to pump blood. Fibrillation can cause complete loss of cardiac function and death within minutes. To restore normal heart contraction and expansion, paramedics and other medical workers use a device, called a defibrillator, to electrically shock a fibrillating heart.
Since the early 1980s, thousands of patients prone to fibrillation episodes have had miniature defibrillators implanted in their bodies, typically in the left breast region above the heart. These implantable defibrillators detect onset of fibrillation and automatically shock the heart, restoring normal heart function without human intervention. A typical implantable defibrillator includes a set of electrical leads, which extend from a sealed housing into the heart of a patient after implantation. Within the housing are a battery for supplying power, heart-monitoring circuitry for detecting fibrillation, and a capacitor for storing and delivering a burst of electric charge through the leads to the heart.
The capacitor is typically an aluminum electrolytic capacitor, which includes two long strips of aluminum foil with two long strips of paper, known as separators, in between them. One of the aluminum foils serves as a cathode (negative) foil, and the other serves as an anode (positive) foil. Each foil has an aluminum tab, extending from its top edge, to facilitate electrical connection to other parts of the capacitor.
The foil-and-paper assembly, known as the active element, is rolled around a removable spindle or mandrel to form a cylinder and placed in a round tubular case, with the two tabs extending toward the top of the case. The paper is soaked, or impregnated, with a liquid electrolytexe2x80x94a very electrically conductive solution containing positive or negative ions. And, the tubular case is sealed shut with a lid called a header. Extending from the header are two terminals connected respectively to the anode foil and cathode foil via the aluminum tabs.
In recent years, manufacturers of aluminum electrolytic capacitors have focused almost single-mindedly on improving the active element by developing aluminum foils, electrolytes, and multiple-anode arrangements that improve capacitor performance, specifically energy densityxe2x80x94the amount of energy or charge a capacitor stores per unit volume. For example, because energy density is directly proportional to the surface area of the aluminum foil making up the capacitive element, manufacturers have focused on methods of etching microscopic hills and valleys into foils to increase their effective surface area.
In comparison, capacitor manufacturers have made little, if any, effort to improve packaging of the active element. For example, three leading manufactures of electrolytic capacitorsxe2x80x94Rubycon, United Chemicon, and Roedersteinxe2x80x94presently provide 330-360 volt, dual-anode aluminum electrolytic capacitors which have total volumes greater than about 6.5 cubic-centimeters (which is roughly the same size as a AA battery.) Yet, when the present inventors studied how this space was used, they determined that the ratio of the volume of the active element to the overall volume of these capacitors was only about 40 percent. Thus, the inventors concluded that about 60 percent of the total capacitor volume was wasted in the sense of failing to directly contribute to the performance of these electrolytic capacitors.
Accordingly, the inventors identified an unmet need to reduce the size of electrolytic capacitors, especially those intended for implantable defibrillators, through better packaging.
To address this and other needs, the inventors devised several improvements intended to reduce the overall size of electrolytic capacitors, particularly those intended for implantable defibrillators. With these improvements, the inventors built an exemplary 360-volt operating, 390-volt surge, 190-microfarad, 15.9-Joule aluminum electrolytic capacitor about 33 percent smaller than conventional capacitors with comparable electrical traits.
One improvement contributing to this size reduction is the use of one or more separators having a thickness less than the standard one-thousandth of an inch used in conventional electrolytic capacitors. The exemplary embodiment uses combinations of paper separators with thicknesses of 0.000787, 0.0005, and 0.00025 inches. For conventional cylindrically wound active elements, reducing separator thickness reduces the space necessary to contain the separators. In turn, this allows one to reduce the diameter and volume of the active element and thus the total volume of the capacitor, or alternatively to increase the size of other components of the active element to increase energy density for a given total volume.
In devising this improvement, the inventors recognized that the conventional practice of using thick paper separators stems from at least three design objectives that are of lesser relevance to implantable defibrillators. The first is that thicker paper reduces electrolyte depletion, or evaporation, and thus generally increases capacitor life. However, the inventors determined that electrolyte depletion has much less effect on capacitor life in medical device applications than it does in the typical applications that govern how conventional electrolytic capacitors are built. In particular, implanted defibrillators are generally not subject to the same long-term temperature variations and extremes that conventional capacitors are designed to withstand.
Secondly, conventional manufacturers used the standard thick paper because it is less likely to tear or break during fabrication, particularly during the conventional high-speed process of winding the foil-and-paper assembly around a spindle. Thus, using the thick paper allows conventional manufacturers to make capacitors faster. However, manufacturing speed is not very important to defibrillator makers who need to make many fewer capacitors than conventional manufacturers and thus can generally afford more time making them.
Thirdly, conventional manufacturers use the thick papers to reduce the chance of anode and cathode foils contacting each other and therefore causing capacitor failure during functional testing. Since failed capacitors are generally discarded or recycled, using thick papers ultimately reduces manufacturing waste. However, waste is of less concern when making a small number of capacitors for implantable defibrillators than it is when making millions of capacitors as do most conventional manufacturers.
Another improvement contributing to the 33-percent size reduction is the use of separators with end margins less than two millimeters. The end margins are the portions of the separators which extend beyond the width of the cathode and anode foils. Conventional paper separators are about four-to-six millimeters wider than the aluminum foils of the active element, with the excess width typically divided to form equal top and bottom margins of two-to-three millimeters. Thus, when wound into a roll and stood up on one end, the top and bottom margins increase the overall height of the active element and the overall height of the case needed to contain the active element.
Conventional manufacturers use the large end margins for at least two reasons: to protect the foils from damage during high-speed manufacturing processes, and to insulate the foils of the active element from an aluminum case after insertion into the case. In particular, during high-speed winding, the foil and paper can easily become misaligned or skewed so that the edges of the foil extend beyond the edges of the papers, making them prone to bending, creasing, or tearing. The large, conventional end margins allow room for misalignment while also protecting the foil edges during high-speed winding. After insertion into a tubular case, the end margins separate the edges of the rolled foil from the top and bottom of the case, preventing the electrically conductive case from shorting the anode and cathode foils.
In devising this improvement, the inventors determined that the end margins could be greatly reduced, even eliminated completely in some embodiments, by more carefully winding the foils and separators during manufacture. Additionally, the inventors devised other ways of insulating foils from cases, while reducing capacitor size.
Specifically, the exemplary embodiment of the invention, which has little or no end margins, includes insulative inserts, for example, flat paper disks, between the bottom of the active element and the bottom of the case and between the top of the active element and the underside of a lid on the case. Other embodiments enclose substantially all of the active element within an insulative bag.
Other improvements include reducing the thickness of the capacitor lid, or header, by about 50 percent, reducing the space between the underside of the lid and the top of the active element, reducing the diameter of the normally empty mandrel region of the active element, and reducing thickness of the aluminum tube. Like the use of thinner separators, smaller end margins, and insulative inserts, these ultimately allow reductions in the size of electrolytic capacitors and implantable defibrillators which incorporate them.